Hasnain says:

"One meta point to keep in mind: many of the points here mirror the downsides of dynamic typing in comparison to static typing (again, not to imply that dynamic typing is not sometimes useful), because in some sense, it is the same problem but in a different context – instead of run time vs compile time, we’re talking about instantiation time vs declaration time. Yes, you have more flexibility to do whatever you want, but the problem is that you have more flexibility to do whatever you want."

Hasnain says:

Been a while since I've read a fun little short scifi story.

Hasnain says:

Where entertainment meets science meets legal freedom. A lucky glance at a MythBusters episode lead to people being able to make a new appeal for freedom - and finally get free from prison for a crime they didn't commit.

"Detective Victor Switski, who led the interrogation, handcuffed Mr. Galvan to a wall and proceeded to interrogate and intimidate him for hours, pressuring the 18-year-old to implicate others in the crime in order for him to return home. Deceptive tactics — like offering leniency in exchange for a confession or falsely telling children they can go home if they confess — have been identified as risk factors for false confessions, and young people are especially vulnerable to falsely confessing as a result of these tactics.

Deception in interrogations of youth remains legal in 46 states.

In 2021, Illinois and Oregon became the first states to ban the use of deception during interrogations of minors, but at the time of Mr. Galvan’s interrogation, deception could still legally be used in interrogations of youth. Unfortunately, deception remains legal in interrogations of adults in every state, and can still legally be employed against youth in 46 states."

Hasnain says:

I still need to go listen to the podcasts (Philip’s writings at FB we’re always great and thought provoking). But this was super interesting and eye opening at times.

“When I was leading the London office for Facebook, I was going to evening events, recruiting people, and I was giving tech talks in the evening. I was working all day and one day, my then seven year old son came into the room. We had bought a little Norse chess set and he asked if we could play sometime. I said, sure thing, no problem. And as a seven year old, he said "Can you put it on your calendar?"

That was such a moment of a mirror being held up to me of “Wow, something has gone wrong”. When I say to my son we'll play chess, his first response is to be skeptical and to say, "can you put it on your calendar?" That really tells you where your priorities are, right? And so that moment for me was very sobering.”

Hasnain says:

I found some of the twitter follow ups interesting: people
who actually had this happen to them didn’t have nightmares about it - presumably cause they saw it wasn’t that big a deal after all.

“Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University and the author of Pandemic Dreams and The Committee of Sleep, confirmed my suspicion. She rattled off a few common school-dream variations: The dreamer has to rush to an exam after having overslept, or they can’t find their classroom, or they prepared for an exam by studying the wrong subject, or they sit down for an exam and the text is in hieroglyphics, or they show up to school nude. “It’s a really common theme,” she told me. “And it’s common not only for people who are still in school … It’s a very common theme for people who are far into adulthood, who have been out of school forever.””

Hasnain says:

This was a decent read - the texts were quite hilarious to see (I saw a bunch of tldrs on twitter).

“There is a tendency, especially when it comes to the über-rich and powerful, to assume and to fantasize about what we can’t see. We ascribe shadowy brilliance or malevolence, which may very well be unearned or misguided. What’s striking about the Musk messages, then, is the similarity between these men’s behavior behind closed doors and in public on Twitter. Perhaps the real revelation here is that the shallowness you see is the shallowness you get.”

Hasnain says:

Now this is some really impressive work, taking costs from $1.8M/yr to $10k/yr for log storage. I liked how it was an iterative process, massaging and moving around data till it can be compressed much better. Reminds me of some work we did back in the day to split up data a little for better compression. The wins are huge!

“We have deployed Phase 1 (i.e., the custom Log4j appender with our custom float encoding) across our entire Spark platform. We are currently working on deploying the Phase 2 compression and integrating CLP’s search capability into our analytics and observability platforms.

Result of Phase 1 compression: In a 30-day window, our entire Spark ecosystem generated 5.38PB of uncompressed INFO level unstructured logs yet our CLP appender compressed them to only 31.4TB, amounting to an unprecedented 169x compression ratio. Now with CLP, we have restored our log verbosity from WARN back to INFO, and we can afford to retain all the logs for 1 month (as requested by our engineers).

Preliminary result of Phase 2 compression: The above mentioned result is only the size of the compressed IR. We have tested a prototype of CLP’s complete compression (including both Phase 1 and 2) on a subset of our Spark logs, and CLP’s compression ratio is 2.16x higher than Zstandard’s ratio and 2.28x higher than Gzip’s ratio. This is consistent with the results reported on other log datasets. “

Hasnain says:

"Day-by-day, month-by-month, the App Store will get a little less rich and vibrant as apps start being designated as outdated and get removed. Another consequence of this hostile policy is that indie and hobbyist developers may stop building mobile apps. After all, the web is fundamentally a more stable place for experimental software and “finished artworks”, since backwards-compatibility is the gold standard and apps can run indefinitely.

After 4 hours of work to re-compile my app and 44 hours waiting in the review queue, WorldAnimals is now updated to a new version. I am safe for at least another three years before getting automatically flagged for removal. Unless, that is, Apple decides there is a new threshold for “outdated” and change their policy once again."

Hasnain says:

"I’ll end with some advice to remember next year as the downturn ends and the upswing begins. The personal freedom to ignore downturns comes from financial stability, and the best path to financial stability is taking money off the table whenever you can until you’ve reached financial independence. A lot of financial advice out there is written from the perspective of very wealthy folks. If you’re already wealthy, your goal is to maximize the risk-adjusted expected return of endeavors, often by taking meaningful risk. For example, if you’re wealthy, it’s almost always the right decision to early exercise your equity. If you have millions of dollars, then it’s reasonable to risk $100k now for the potential of millions in reduced tax in six years. That’s not necessarily true when you’re not already wealthy."

Hasnain says:

“In light of all this, it's only natural that Providence would turn to McKinsey when they needed help committing crimes and destroying thousands of people's lives. McKinsey helped Providence craft a program to coerce poor people into paying for care they were entitled to get for free. They called it "Rev-Up."

Writing in the New York Times, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas reveal the full depravity of "Rev-Up." McKinsey advised Providence to train its staff to avoid truthfully answer poor patients' queries about whether they were eligible for free care.”